US brands

Consumers are brand curators in this integrated, experiential, social screen age. What are the questions brand owners need to be asking, and to whom?

The sheer number and complexity of meanings assigned to the word ‘brand’ is a modern marketing dilemma. Add to this consumer expectation of the role we expect brands to play in our lives, and how we want them to behave, and you’ll hear dissension in the ranks.

Paul Theroux was right when he said today in the Opinion pages of The New York Times, in his article titled, ‘Troop therapy’, “SOME pizza deliverymen are safe drivers, and though it seems incredible given the recent news to the contrary, some clergymen are pious, some politicians monogamous and some car dealers honest. There are ethical Boy Scout masters, too. Yet nothing is so satisfying to the lazy mind as news that reinforces a negative stereotype.”

Like this:

Mr. Woods isn’t the only product or cause that has used death in some way to motivate customer response. In pondering the use of a dead man’s voice in a major ad campaign I came across some unrelated and diverse examples in the media where death plays its role. The reality is, in whichever way it’s used, it’s shocking but powerful.

Moxie Sozo is the design and advertising agency responsible for the Haiti Poster Project. The same idea has helped raise money for Hurricane Katrina victims in 2005 and the California fire victims in 2007. Two recent poster additions to the Haiti Poster project from Pentagram’s Harry Pearce and Justus Oehlerand are profiled in the latest issue of Creative Review.

A peculiar story in the British media that ran in February was about Channel 4 TV’s search for a terminally ill patient who would be willing to volunteer to be mummified as part of a documentary. The ads read: ‘We are currently keen to talk to someone who, faced with the knowledge of their own terminal illness and all that it entails, would nonetheless consider undergoing the process of an ancient Egyptian embalming.’ And the surprise bonus is that the chosen candidate may be forever on display in a museum! How cool is that?

And back to Tiger… CBS asked Ad Week’s Barbara Lipford to explain what she thought of the campaign –